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Introduction to Parallel Computation. FDI 2007 Track Q Day 1 – Morning Session. Track Q Overview. Monday Intro to Parallel Computation Parallel Architectures and Parallel Programming Concepts Message-Passing Paradigm, MPI MPI Topics Tuesday Data-Parallelism
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Introduction to Parallel Computation FDI 2007 Track Q Day 1 – Morning Session
Track Q Overview • Monday • Intro to Parallel Computation • Parallel Architectures and Parallel Programming Concepts • Message-Passing Paradigm, MPI • MPI Topics • Tuesday • Data-Parallelism • Master/Worker and Asynchronous Communication • Parallelizing Sequential Codes • Performance: Evaluation, Tuning, Visualization • Wednesday • Shared-Memory Parallel Computing, OpenMP • Practicum, BYOC
What is Parallel Computing? • “Multiple CPUs cooperating to solve one problem.” • Motivation: • Solve a given problem faster • Solve a larger problem in the same time • (Take advantage of multiple cores in an SMP) • Distinguished from … • Distributed computing • Grid computing • Ensemble computing
Why is Parallel Computing Difficult? • Existing codes are too valuable to discard. • We don’t think in parallel. • There are hard problems that must be solved without sacrificing performance, e.g., synchronization, communication, load balancing. • Parallel computing platforms are too diverse, programming environments are too low-level.
Parallel Architectures • An evolving field: vector supercomputers, MPPs, clusters, constellations, multi-core, GPUs, … • Shared-Memory vs. Distributed-Memory Compute Node CPU CPU CPU CPU Compute Node M M Compute Node M Switch/bus Interconnect Memory Compute Node Compute Node M M
Parallel Algorithms: Some Approaches • Loop-based parallelism • Functional vs data parallelism • Domain decomposition • Pipelining • Master/worker • Embarrassingly parallel, ensembles, screen-saver science
Parallel Algorithms: Loop-Based Parallelism Do I = 1 to n . . . End do Do in parallel I = 1 to n . . . End do →
Parallel Algorithms: Functional vs. Data Parallelism f0 f0 g0 g1 g2 g(1:4) g(5:8) g(9:12) f1 f1
Parallel Algorithms: Pipelining f1 f2 f3
Parallel Algorithms: Master/Worker Master W6 W1 W2 W3 W5 W4
Evaluating and Predicting Performance • Theoretical approaches: asymptotic analysis, complexity theory, analytic modeling of systems and algorithms. • Empirical approaches: benchmarking, metrics, visualization.
“How do I program a parallel computer?” Some possible answers: 1. As always. • Rely on compiler, libraries, run-time system. • Comment: general solution very unlikely 2. New or extended programming language. • Re-write code, use new compilers & run-time. • Comment: lots of academia, small market-share
“How do I program a parallel computer?” (cont’d) 3. Existing language + compiler directives. • Compiler extension or pre-preprocessor optionally handles explicitly parallel constructs. • Comment: OpenMP widely-used for shared-memory machines. 4. Existing language + library calls. • Explicitly (re-)code for threads or message passing. • Comment: most common approach, especially for distributed memory machines.